A six-microRNA signature can better predict overall survival of patients with esophagus adenocarcinoma

Abstract

Background The microRNAs (miRNAs) have been validated as prognostic markers in many cancers. Here, we aimed at developing a miRNA-based signature for predicting the prognosis of esophagus adenocarcinoma (EAC). Methods The RNA-sequencing data set of EAC was downloaded from The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). Eighty-four patients with EAC were classified into a training set and a test set randomly. Using univariate Cox regression analysis and the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO), we identified prognostic factors and constructed a prognostic miRNA signature. The accuracy of the signature was evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. Result In general, in the training set, six miRNAs (hsa-mir-425, hsa-let-7b, hsa-mir-23a, hsa-mir-3074, hsa-mir-424 and hsa-mir-505) displayed good prognostic power as markers of overall survival for EAC patients. Relative to patients in the low-risk group, those assigned to the high-risk group according to their risk scores of the designed miRNA model displayed reduced overall survival. This 6-miRNA model was validated in test and entire set. The area under curve (AUC) for ROC at 3 years was 0.959, 0.840, and 0.868 in training, test, and entire set, respectively. Molecular functional analysis and pathway enrichment analysis indicated that the target messenger RNAs associated with 6-miRNA signature were closely related to several pathways involved in carcinogenesis, especially cell cycle. Conclusion In summary, a novel 6-miRNA expression-based prognostic signature derived from the EAC data of TCGA was constructed and validated for predicting the prognosis of EAC.

Multivariate gene expression‐based survival predictor model in esophageal adenocarcinoma

“…Lan et al reported a six miRNA signature of esophageal adenocarcinoma in 2019. 14 Skinner et al reported a validated miRNA profile to predict response to therapy in esophageal adenocarcinoma. 15 However, they focused on miRNA while in our study we focused on mRNA, and the results of part of the six miRNA are consistent with those involved in our study.…”

“…[11][12][13] There have been previous efforts to identify biomarkers for the prognosis of EAC. Some have proposed a predictor model of EAC using miRNA, 14,15 while others have conducted prognostic risk factor analysis based on the interaction between miRNA and mRNA. 16 However, to the best of our knowledge, there has not been any analysis using the lncRNA-miRNA-mRNA competing endogenous RNA (ceRNA) network for EAC, which provides a more reliable analysis.…”

Bioinformatics analysis of esophageal cancer unveils an integrated mRNA‑lncRNA signature for predicting prognosis

“…Fan et al (20) developed a novel 8-lncRNA signature for the prediction of prognosis in patients with ESCA. Additionally, a previous study reported that the dysregulated expression of certain micro (mi)RNAs (hsa-mir-425, hsa-let-7b, hsa-mir-23a, hsa-mir-3074, hsa-mir-424 and hsa-mir-505) could be used for the prognosis of esophageal adenocarcinoma (6). To the best of our knowledge, previous studies have only focused on mRNAs, lncRNAs or miRNAs, without investigating multi-RNA-based data.…”

“…The prognostic values of mRNAs and lncRNAs were determined using univariate Cox proportional hazards regression analysis. According to previous studies, P<0.1 was considered to indicate a statistically significant difference (6,13,14). Subsequently, a total of 106 tumor samples were randomly divided into two sets: A training set (n=53) and a test set (n=53; Table I).…”

“…Furthermore, clinicopathological characteristics are molecular comprehensive reflections, including proteins and genes. Patients with ESCA with homogeneous clinical stage may be further classified according to various molecular patterns, like a 6-microRNA signature reported by Lan et al (6). It is therefore crucial to determine novel biomarkers for identifying patients with high risk of mortality.…”